Implementing a multiple-database xquery system cd.

4. DOMAINS OF APPLICATION

This research is focused, primarily, at the scientific community in and out of academia. The scientific community is where business was thirty years ago, lacking the necessary means to store and retrieve their data in an efficient way. The use of XML technologies and the cross query system are meant to be a step towards remedying their situation. As it stands now, it is very difficult for scientists to share data with each other. For the most part, this problem stems from the use of different and often proprietary means to store data. What this means now is for data to be shared, it must be understood, then converted into a form usable by those who requested the data. Without a standard means to collect and store data, the current scheme is very time consuming and wasteful of resources. The benefit the cross query system brings is the ability to easily traverse XML data in order to discover relationships previously unknown because now the proprietary data has been converted and stored in XML databases. The implications of this means that science projects spread over a nation have one easy method for collecting and retrieving data spread over many laboratories. Medical examiners and pathologists could, for instance, compare data between labs to determine error rates in sample testing.